Meet Jeremy Buhler, Assessment Librarian at UBC Library

The Assessment Office at UBC Library is headed by Assessment Librarian Jeremy Buhler, who works with senior management, Library committees and other groups across campus to provide data-driven insights on Library operations and programs.

Unlike many librarians, Jeremy isn’t on a service desk and doesn’t have direct contact with students in his day-to-day, but his work trickles down to affect students all across campus. “In my role as assessment librarian, I’m helping the Library collect the information that it needs to understand the impact of its activities and the expectations of UBC’s community of users. Within that, there’s a number side of things that involves managing activity levels,” he says.

There’s also a more qualitative side to the role, he explains, whenever his team conducts surveys and focus groups. Two-way communication with library users is a priority for him: “If we do a survey, for example, we reflect back on the results of that survey and let that start a deeper conversation and a more nuanced understanding of our role within the UBC community.”

Data sharing is another priority, as Jeremy explores ways to make library data accessible and easy for people to interpret. “It’s part of my role to harness tools like Tableau to use data visualization to make that kind of data tell us a story of our users and of our activities,” he says.

In 2016, Jeremy was the recipient of a UBC Library Employee Excellence Award, recognizing his subject matter expertise and dedication to his work for the past seven years. But Jeremy’s history with the Library extends back even further than this, to his time as an undergraduate when he got a job shelving books. “Even though I later left and worked elsewhere for a while, when an opportunity at UBC came up, it was the relationships I had developed with library staff at that very early stage that drew me back to campus.”

Thinking about his most memorable library experience outside of UBC, Jeremy recalls a solo road trip from Winnipeg to Vancouver he took years ago. “At the Winnipeg Public Library, I was killing time, picked up a book and started reading. Then I stopped in various cities along the way and picked up the same book and used the library as a place to rest and catch my breath, spend an afternoon, and pick up the thread of the story. It was a really fantastic way for the story of that book—and the story of Canada’s network of public libraries—to become the thread that linked those places together.”